


With A Flower, With A Flame

by FyrMaiden



Category: Glee
Genre: Depression, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Series Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-04
Updated: 2014-09-04
Packaged: 2018-02-16 04:17:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2255589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warnings: Depression, mental health<br/>Summary: The one where Blaine’s mom knows she can’t fix her son, but she can love him.</p>
<p>601 spoiler reaction. MAJOR spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With A Flower, With A Flame

**Author's Note:**

> Solitude stands in the doorway  
> I’m struck once again by her black silhouette  
> By her long cool stare and her silence  
> I suddenly remember each time we’ve met  
>  ~ Solitude Standing, Suzanne Vega
> 
> (Thanks once again to misqueue for taking time out to go over this with me, and for listening to me babble about the parts I was struggling with. Thanks also to mi-kitamura for the original prompt. This is... not quite that, but it's close. I hope. The parts that are left are all me, and no one else should be held responsible.)

Blaine calls at the beginning of December, and Anita isn’t home. “Mom?” he says to the machine. “Mommy?” His sounds voice small and far away, and Anita feels her heart sink as she listens. There’s a pause on the playback, and “Okay, you’re not home. I’m, um. I’m going to be home for Christmas, I think? Almost certainly. I’m, um. I don’t – Mom, can you call me back, please?”

*

Blaine doesn’t just come home for Christmas. When she calls him, he breaks down. Anita Anderson wants nothing so much as she wants to wrap her arms around him and smooth his hair and his fraying nerves. He tries to tell her, between breaths and through the pain, that everything is over, that he’s been stupid and naive and _young_ , that he can’t do this on his own, or do anything, really, and that he wants to come home. He wants to leave New York, and Kurt, and NYADA, and come home. He’ll do something next year, maybe, or he’ll get a job, or... Or he doesn’t know. He just wants to sleep in his room with his stuff and never think about the could-have-beens ever again. He wants to come home. Is that okay? Can he just stop pretending like everything is fine and try to remember who he used to be? “I don’t think I even like myself anymore, Mom,” he whispers, and Anita’s heart breaks.

“Oh, Blaine,” she says, softly. “You don’t even have to ask.”

*

In the week it takes for Blaine to wrap up his affairs and tell her he’s ready to leave, Anita thinks a lot about the first boy she’d thought was The One. They were 21, almost done with college, and full of dreams and ideas of how the future would work. The reality of living with him, of finding herself constantly cleaning up after him, of cooking for him, of waiting for him to come home so that she could feed his food into the garbage disposal in his actual presence, had made her want to drive the kitchen shears straight into his frontal cortex. She, too, had packed her things into boxes, called one of her girlfriends to come pick her up, and had couch surfed for a month whilst she found a permanent roommate.

She can’t and won’t blame either of them for trying, then, or for failing. Living with another person is hard. Learning to cohabit and share space, learning one another’s boundaries, all of it takes time and communication, and she knows how Blaine can be.

She also knows how much of his heart he gave away, and she’ll do anything to keep what’s left safe.

*

Anita doesn’t say a word on the drive home from New York. Blaine sits quietly in the back of the car, his earbuds in, staring at the relentless rolling miles that take him away from everything he worked so hard for and which fell apart so spectacularly. Beside her, Blaine’s father sings softly along to the radio. In the trunk is every part of Blaine’s life that he wanted to keep. There’s a lot of it still sitting in boxes one hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles east of them.

Blaine hasn’t cried, or not in her presence. She has though. Standing in the vastness of the Bushwick loft that had, eighteen months ago, represented the future, Anita had cried and Blaine had wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face into her neck, and they’d held one another for the longest minute. Then she’d pulled herself together, wiped her eyes, and helped him carry boxes and bags to the car. There will be no recriminations, not from her. Blaine has made the decision for himself that he feels is best, and she’s been through enough with Blaine to trust him to make his choices now. She’d watched him pull the door closed for the final time, though, and felt the weight of it settle in her chest. She’s watched Blaine break himself against this wall before, and she makes a decision: there will be no more chances for this to hurt him. There will be no more grand gestures, no more overwrought declarations of forever. They will take him back to Ohio, help him find his dream again, and make sure he learns to put himself first in it.

That’s the plan, anyway. Watching him stare out of the window, gaze only shifting to check his phone now and then, she doesn’t think it will be that easy.

*

Anita sits with him in his room, cardboard box between her feet, silent as he passes mementos to her to store. There are trinkets, keepsakes, Valentines and sweethearts, CDs and leftover sweatshirts that neither of them wanted in their new lives, and all of them go into the box. Blaine is silent as he tears everything down, his face blank. Occasionally he stops and turns in futile circles and scrubs a hand through his hair or covers his eyes, and she watches as he tries to remember how to breathe. When the box is full and he is done, he gestures to the bedspread she is sitting on. “Can we change that?” he says. “I don’t think green is my colour.”

“Sure,” she says softly, and folds in the flaps of the box before standing to help strip the sheets from the bed.

When they are done, the bed changed to a neutral cream and the room bare of personality, Blaine smiles for the first time since she picked him up. It’s heavy, and it’s not him, not yet, but it’s a smile and that’s more than she had hoped for. Maybe it’s a beginning.

*

It’s not.

Christmas is a muted affair. There isn’t a lot of joy to be had. Blaine fixes his hair and dresses appropriately, and appears in the kitchen with a smile at a little after 9. He eats a little, picking his food apart into crumbs first, and takes his coffee with him into the family room, where Anita finds him sat with his feet tucked up underneath him, staring morosely at the tree that twinkles in the window, at the heirloom decorations and the ones he made in kindergarten.

As the morning wears on, Blaine picks at the corners of his gifts. Anita has taken care to remove anything from the pile that she remembers buying for both of them, when there was a ‘them’ to buy for, and Blaine remembers, once or twice, how to smile. There is a bowtie with reindeer on it that makes him almost laugh, a soft wet sound that stops at his lips, but for the most part the day remains too close to the end of the world to be fully enjoyed.

After lunch, Blaine excuses himself and takes himself and his books and his new iPod back to his room. In the cold still, Anita looks at her husband, who bows his head and says nothing. This Blaine is one they’ve known before, the one that survived what has become, colloquially, The Incident, the one who tried desperately to disappear so he wouldn’t be a burden to anybody. This is the Blaine they sent to a private school where he’d be safe, and who they took into the Summer of the Misguided Chevy in the hope it would give him something outside of himself to focus on. He’s older this time, though. He doesn’t need distraction. He didn’t need it when he was thirteen, either. Anita sips at her coffee and tries to quell the panic that flares hot and sudden inside of her. She couldn’t put him back together then, and she knows she can’t do it now.

So she does what she knows how to do instead. She loves him with everything she has.

*

Blaine spends the last week of December rearranging his wardrobe, and then his life. He begins bringing his laptop to the kitchen, a frown of concentration creasing his forehead as he works out how to move forward from this point. He moves from the counter only to refill his mug or to find something in the fridge to eat, padding silently around the kitchen on socked feet. She thinks that if you didn’t know him, to all intents and purposes he seems fine, functional and alert and chatty, even, when she talks to him, but he’s not the boy who went to New York and that worries her. She watches him for signs that he’s stumbling, but he seems resolute in his work. She knows him better now than she did when he was 13. They got through his senior year, and they can get through this as well.

Quietly, without fanfare, she has decided that they will not mention Kurt, not unless Blaine brings him up specifically. It might not be the wisest recourse, but she’s not sure she can remain entirely civil about this boy who seems to use Blaine up and throw him away when dealing with him becomes too much like hard work. And he can be that, she knows all too well. Much like his father, Blaine bottles all of his feelings away, doesn’t talk about them until they’re brimming over, exploding out of him, and by then it’s too late. He expends all of his energy on being perfect, or his version thereof, so that people will continue to love him, not knowing that people will love him regardless. He’s been the same since he and Cooper used to have their competitions. He loves the spotlight, but he won’t fight for it, not the way some people will. Not the way Cooper would. Sipping coffee and watching him work, she thinks that if that’s a fault, then perhaps they could all learn from him.

*

The thing is, she says, sipping red wine and thinking aloud, her husband’s hands warm and relaxing on her shoulders, is that 20 year old boys shouldn’t be trusted with hamsters, much less fragile things like hearts. He laughs, and she glances over her shoulder at him. “No, I’m serious,” she says, and he nods.

“I don’t doubt it,” he says. “And as a former twenty year old boy, I’m not saying you’re wrong, per se. I couldn’t keep a plant alive at twenty, not with college and girls to be concerned about as well. I just don’t think you’re being fair.”

She nods, and allows that he’s maybe correct. She’s not being fair. It’s just that it’s early evening now, and the only evidence that she has a son living with her again has been the sound of the shower and the muted thud of closing doors. If Blaine has eaten, it was in the hour she was out of the house for, which she plans to rectify once dinner is ready. She tries not to worry for him, but it’s futile. He’s her baby, and he’s special.

It’s not, she rationalises, pouring over website after website, each less helpful than the one before, that she has always mistrusted Kurt’s ability to navigate Blaine. It’s more that she’s been wary of how he’s handled Blaine’s affection before. She hasn’t always fully believed that Kurt understood exactly how deeply Blaine felt for him, and the spiral of Blaine’s emotions after Kurt had left for New York had done nothing to ease her concerns. For Anita, Blaine will always be the top priority, and she has had many reasons to doubt Kurt’s understanding of Blaine’s fragile heart and abiding devotion. Blaine is demonstrative. He believes in big statements and grand gestures, in tangible evidence and shared spaces. Blaine, since he was small, has invested deeply in spoken promises, and has never learned to navigate loneliness or disappointment. So when Kurt told him, repeatedly, that he was never saying goodbye to him, parroted by Blaine over numerous meals as a slowly eroding excuse for dropped calls and missed dates, Blaine had believed it with every atom.

Truthfully, she doesn’t entirely blame Kurt for the ghost that drifts occasionally from room to room, his hair tidy and his clothes clean and his face devoid of expression. Trying to be responsible for himself and for Blaine was always a big ask, a lot to shoulder, and there has been so much for them to learn about one another. Anita knows how easy it can be to fall into the trap of believing it’s possible to make Blaine better with the right words in the right combination at the right time. It took her a long time to understand that that wasn’t how it worked. Kurt has only had a short time, really. But the longer that time went on, the more she had believed that he understood, that he knew, that he would get that sometimes all Blaine needed him to be was present.

It’s not mature or adult, she knows, to blame a child for the failure of this insurmountable thing. But when it comes to Blaine, she won’t pretend to be either of those things.

*

The third week of January, she receives a text from a number she doesn’t recognise. “New number, Mom. Love you.” When she gets home from work, Blaine is sat on the floor of the family room with Sam Evans, take out boxes all around them and Blaine’s XBox hooked up to the TV. Sam waves amiably and smiles around half a slice of pizza. “Hey, Mrs A,” he says once he’s swallowed, and Anita smiles.

“Hi, Sam. How are you?”

“Pretty good,” he says, nodding enthusiastically. Behind him, Blaine smiles that warm affectionate smile he has for boys he likes, and Anita feels it warm in her chest as well. She likes Sam. She likes that he is unfazed by Blaine, and she likes that Blaine has him here, now.

“Make sure you clear up after yourselves,” she warns, gesturing the boxes and cables around them. Blaine rolls his eyes, and Sam puts his thumbs up. “I assume you boys won’t need anything else to eat, either?”

Blaine shakes his head, and turns back to their game, and Anita watches as Sam swipes the controller from his hands in frustration. It’s good, she thinks. It’s normal. It’s nice.

In the kitchen, Blaine’s laptop is open on the Dalton show choir blog. She smiles as she folds the lid closed. Blaine is charmingly predictable in his patterns of coping. Cut out everything that hurts, build a wall and close it away, and return to the familiar and the safe.

Sam Evans, pizza rolls, and the Dalton Academy Warblers.

He’s not better, she knows better than to think that. But he’s trying to be okay in the ways he knows how, and she can’t berate him for that.


End file.
